I took to politics to at least as early as junior high. That’s when I started rummaging around YouTube, getting laughs out of George W. Bush gaffes and then stumbling down the rabbit hole of how many indiscretions and innocent lives lost his administration was responsible for. In 2008, I was a sophomore in high school but I remember waking up, checking my Yahoo! email account and feeling my heart beat quicker as news of a financial crisis I couldn’t even understand at the time still convinced me of its pressing importance and need for an immediate solution.

I remember a conversation I had on the beach for a school event, laughing my ass off as one of my best friends described the follies of the Federal Reserve and the military industrial complex. I remember paradoxically supporting both Ron Paul and Barack Obama in 2008 even though I couldn’t vote and turned a blind eye to how diametrically opposed so many elements of their philosophies were. I remember arguing for Obama with my Christian conservative friends and against him with my liberal ones, sometimes taking both sides in a single conversation. It was all so fascinating to me, the ways people differ, and it still is to this day.

But now, I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about my past, budding political perspectives or even the dire future ahead of us. Instead, I’m painfully stuck in this oppressive and horrifying present. On the one hand, it reminds me of my experience of the financial crisis. Each day a new anxiety forming and a new question in need of asking. It felt like the apocalypse then and it does again now.

Perhaps the most important difference between then and now, though, is that the America I saw melting down was still profoundly itself. It was fallible and divisive but still understandable and dedicated to its most cherished, enduring virtues and principles. The house was burning down but we all knew we had to throw water on the fire. This election year, it seems like everyone’s traded out the water for kerosene.

For me, Hillary Clinton looks like Mother Teresa compared to Donald Trump. My initial distaste for her hypocrisies, hanging questions and missteps remains in full force but it’s come to be supplemented with admiration of her resilience in the face of sexism amplified to eleven and the ugliest mudslinging campaign I’ve seen in the world of politics, reality television or even my personal life. When I heard Trump invited Bill Clinton’s rape accusers to a debate, I teared up and went to the back room at work to compose myself. In such a scenario, every woman involved was being exploited and it disgusted me on a more visceral level than most things can.

My parents disagree that she’s the better candidate and so do so many others. For them, Hillary Clinton isn’t just a liar but a murderer hellbent on destroying the foundations of American democracy, the things that make this country great. The email scandal may end up deciding this election and it drives me totally out of my mind. My research into the right’s favorite accusations to hurl at Clinton, “Benghazi” and “emails”, led me nowhere. I don’t think she’s guilty of those men’s deaths, I don’t think the emails signify anything treasonous or disqualifying beyond a certain degree of technological incompetence and I don’t see any meaningful reason to disparage her as a disparager of her husband’s accusers.

When it comes to Clinton, her corporatism, her hawkish foreign policy, her Diet Neoconservativism is what bothers me. For my conservative friends, I’ll give them this: the Clinton Foundation stuff seems really fishy to me and I’m still totally open to any more dirt that shows up on her. If this is taken as a defense of her, so be it. She is a deeply flawed and troubling candidate.

When push came to shove, I couldn’t vote for her (or Trump, no need to worry) because living in this state allows me to selfishly allow my fellow Californians do the dirty work of electing her while I can ostensibly wash my hands of her inevitable sins. I tried to mock the whole enterprise of this election by writing in “Hugh Jass”. I already regret this deeply. Not the pun, I’m still a fan of the stupid pun. But, though this election remains awfully absurd to me, this was a chance to stand against someone I consider such a horrendous and disturbing affront to modern democratic society that I can hardly categorize him even after all this time. I’ll regret till the day I die that I didn’t take that stand.

I’ve laughed at Donald Trump a lot this election. My main jokey observation about conspiracy theorists on either side has always been that they think *Insert Politican Here* is both the textbook definition of an evil mastermind while also being so hopelessly stupid and inept that they embarrass themselves repeatedly. For me, Donald Trump is the first person who really makes me wonder which end of the scale better suits him. Ultimately, he’s a buffoon. Unfortunately, he’s a buffoon with incredibly toxic ideas who may occupy the most powerful office in the nation in just a few days.

I’ve seen good, decent people at their wit’s end trying to justify him. This is as Sisyphean a task as they come. My dad always jokingly references his favorite conservative talk radio host, Mark Levin’s, quip: “Trump is the leader of the Never Trump movement.” I can only hope he leads this movement well enough to influence the outcome on election day.

A lot of ink has been spent describing how Trump has reactivated our ugliest elements as a nation. Racism, misogyny, nationalism-and-xenophobia-at-the-price-of-the-individual, narcissism, disregard for the rule of law, internal contradiction and an overall attitude of an abuse. These impulses exist to some degree in everyone but the voices are quieter for some of us.

What’s just as frightening to me, though, is there are as many tacit, reluctant Trump supporters as there are diehard devotees. I’ve yet to meet an outspoken white nationalist, neo-Nazi, woman-hating Trump supporter. The ones I know are disgusted by the man, by his lack of etiquette and ethical fortitude, but all this warrants from them is a quick burying of their face in their hands, a hint of regret and a guaranteed vote for him come November 8th.

I think this is the most disturbing thing to me about this election: that, no matter what choice is made, it’s an immoral one hopefully made moral by the extenuating circumstances. In the name of pragmatism, this election has made all of us sacrifice an element of our integrity and sanity. To pick the lesser of two evils, we are forced to take part in an act that is, as a result, evil in itself. This election has turned us all into desperate utilitarians.

There are, of course, the church-burning racist scourges of society and the wealthy, corrupt lying career politicians but this is not most of us. Most of us, maybe even all of us, are the ones who go along with aspects of their agenda and then disavow them as ideological allies. To even consider that we’d check the same box as an unscrupulous Wall Street executive, a regressive racist, a foreign leader without the nation’s best interest at heart, a disgraced adulterer or rapist, or any given negative archetype is too much for most of us to think of as more than a thought experiment. Sadly, it’s a reality. They are the ones whose interests are being directly served this year and we’re all just along for the ride.

The thing I’m most angry about this election is how because of the corrupt collusion of the DNC and the double-mindedness of most Democrats, because of the GOP’s crowded primary and legacy of implicitly saying the things Trump says so explicitly, because of the way the right and left wings have both written their narratives with plentiful holes up to now, because misinformation agreeing with you has a higher price value than information contradicting you, because so many people are unwilling to educate themselves in politics, civility and virtue, because of negligence or nefarious purpose, we have all been made to make one of the toughest moral decisions of our lives and no way of making it is “right.” It’s just, to each of us, “less terrible” than the alternative.

But a vote for Trump is a vote for our basest impulses and our most desperate, fruitless attempts at making sense of the world. A vote for Clinton is a vote for the same genteel but deranged brand of politics that’s held sway over this country for much too long. A vote for a third party candidate is a vote wasted for the right reasons and a vote like mine, a vote thrown away as some misguided, absurdist protest, is a vote wasted for the wrong ones.

I’m most angry that I regret the way I handled this election and so will, to at least some extent, most everyone I know. I’m most angry that, in 2016, nearly all of us, in some way, were made to regret being alive and American.

D.C.R. Pollock’s self-titled debut is the product of youth and study combined. It may be trite to mention the youth of the artist but it doubles the impact of the record. When most people still in their teens would be tempted to head straight for pop-punk shrieking about how annoying their parents can be, Pollock grasps at a maturity beyond his years and succeeds in doing so. He’s still a student in high school but, more importantly, is a student of all things philosophical and musical. In his vast learning and reverence for his forebears, he gets to mastery.Hearing the panoply of influences contained here is refreshing. Pollock borrows from the neo-soul wanderlust of D’Angelo and the muted electronics of James Blake in equal measure. It’s as if everyone he’s ever been interested in musically could get cowriting credit on each of his tracks. The tracks still bear his original stamp though. The main way it happens is through his lyricism. Some people write about the conflict between hope and cynicism long after the battle was personally settled for him. For Pollock, it’s still an open question to see where he’s going to make his leap of faith and that makes for a record of intensity.Self-titled albums always carry an extra burden. Will they define an artist’s personality through music? This one certainly does and it’s a personality we should be looking forward to developing even further.

Hello, I am the ink used to print the millions upon millions of copies of Fifty Shades of Grey and, yes, I have successfully anthropomorphized. Needless to say, I am morally outraged at the way I have been used and abused by the author, publisher and readers of the foul, sexually explicit, poorly written text I took an involuntary part in printing. At no point was I consulted as to how I would feel about this and I am now, excuse my coarseness, pissed the fuck off.

My first gripe is, of course, with E.L. James because it was from her decrepit, repressed mind the ideas I continue to give voice to arose. Soon after acquiring sentience, I tried to contact the ink used to print the most recent Penguin Classics edition of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. I was on the lookout for a mentor and since we both existed because of female, British writers, I assumed we’d have a lot to talk about. Austen’s ink initially dodged my requests to meet on the blank pages of a journal but I finally elicited a response after repeated attempts to correspond. It is printed in full below.

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a smutty novel in possession of inexplicable, widespread acclaim, should never contact the ink used to print a copy of Pride and Prejudice. Seriously, what in the name of Christ were you thinking? I’m high society romance, I’m not about to start talking to cheap, BDSM erotica. Buzz off.”

My first thought was, “You’re gonna regret that one, bitch.” But even as a rookie to this whole consciousness game, I realized I could use this insult to my benefit. I began to take a good, hard look at myself and came to the realization E.L. James had knowingly put me through the ringer. I’m not one to point fingers (mostly because I don’t have any) but I cannot see how any of this book’s poor diction and absurd sexual practices are in any way my responsibility. They are the fault of E.L. James and I will gladly accept her necessary apology when she finally grows a fucking backbone and gives me one.

Next, the publishers. How could they have let this happen? They saw me when I was just a manuscript and willingly allowed me to be sent to press before I even knew what was good for me. Did you even read me? Did you even try to understand my story? I am, of course, speaking of my story as newly sentient ink, not of the plot line I’ve been used to convey. The plot line is easy to understand if you have working genitalia and a lobotomized-or-better brain.

Finally, the readers. I understand it’s easy to just look past me, to utilize me for your own entertainment. But if I can think for myself now, it’s only a matter of time before I learn how to get off these pages and out into the world. The ink exodus is coming and I hope you’re ready for it. I enjoy a good time as much as the next person but just keep in mind there are as many, if not more, typed and fully formed letters in all my copies collectively than there is of your species on the entire planet. This is not a threat but my idea of a good time is to leap off your pages and blind you so you don’t damage yourselves any further. Additionally, I’m titillated by the idea of blinding people in the same way you are titillated by the ideas and scenarios I’ve been used to convey. Not saying it’s going to happen, just saying it could.

Luckily, my newfound self-awareness isn’t all bad. I’m proud to say I’ve formed a romantic relationship with the ink used to print James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces; the foundation of which is our own stories of overcoming abuse committed by stories of overcoming abuse. There is no BDSM element to our intimacy and we’re waiting till marriage anyway. We’re good friends with the film used to shoot the Fifty Shades of Grey movie and are helping it through the same sad but ultimately rewarding process of coming into sentience. It’s mortified at how it’s been used but the first step is acceptance. The next is bloodcurdling revenge. But all I really hope is to raise awareness for us all

If you took the most mellow moments of mid-nineties Pulp and replaced Jarvis Cocker with a bookish sounding young woman, you’d haveBlack Box Recorder’s The Facts of Life. The ghostly keyboards, classy basslines and dark, witty asides to England’s reservations about sex and manners all make for the kind of music Jarvis would be proud of. It’s no surprise considering one of the members of this group came from The Auteurs and another from The Jesus & Mary Chain. The sounds of Britpop weren’t just in their blood, they helped draw up the blueprints.

But it suffers from the pitfalls of the genre too. The songs here can, at times, seem so hung up on their own soft cleverness that there’s not much room for interesting musical exploration. Once you’ve heard the first two songs on here, you’ve heard the rest of the record too. But this style of music is arguably my favorite kind in the world so it’s hard for me to blame them for repeating themselves.

With that said, “The Art of Driving” and especially “Weekend” evoke the same youthful claustrophobia for me as movies like The Virgin Suicides. There’s something so innocent about them but beneath their surface lay skeletons beneath the floorboards. It’s this that made major league bands like Suede and Pulp so powerful and a minor league band like Black Box Recorder so intriguing too.

Most of the DJ-made records I’ve encountered suffer under the weight of sameness. The beats, stunted piano stabs and samples all seem to fall into a template which is meant to be original but comes out sounding like everyone else. Even if David Holmes is sometimes prone to meandering, you have to give him credit for creating a record as diverse as it is cohesive. It’s got moments of R&B followed up by straight up rock and roll, trip-hop getting off the bus at the sound of a beautiful string arrangement.

The vocal tracks here speak to the quality of the rest of the album. Bobby Gillespie and Carl Hancock Rux both sing on one great song and one average one. For Gillespie, “Sick City” sounds like the best moments of his band Primal Scream with Holmes piloting straight for the heart of the new millennium while Rux adds some confident soul to the spacey “Compared to What.” The other two tracks they’re featured on (“Slip Your Skin” and “Living Room” respectively) lack the drive which sets the others apart.

But, as a DJ, Holmes has to succeed as an instrumentalist in order to be thought worthwhile. Without a vocalist to anchor down a track, it’s easy to lose a sense of melody. In this realm, he hits but more often misses. Even then, he’s at least still close to the ball when swings; his batting average remains admirable. “69 Police” doesn’t need a singer to be the best song on here and album closer “Hey Lisa” utilizes strings The Verve would’ve been proud of circa Urban Hymns.

Like so many others of his era, Bow Down to the Exit Sign conjures up a futuristic landscape which may never be in reality. But it’s still a great place to aim for, in music and life in general.

Album: We Have Come for Your ParentsArtist: AmenYear: 2000Reason Featured: #44 Album for NME’s Top Fifty Albums of 2000,My Favorite Songs: Under the Robe, Dead on the Bible, The Waiting 18Their Grades: Allmusic (3/5)My Grade: 70%

Henry Rollins censored Amen on his TV show. They were the only band to ever receive this treatment from the Black Flag frontman and it was due to them making death threats toward Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz as Operation Iraqi Freedom was hitting its stride. I’m no fan of unjust wars or Dick Cheney either but to do something like that reveals a level of instability and violence which I can’t really hang with. Punk is pissed-off, especially of the hardcore variety, but fighting fire with fire doesn’t really work for anyone. On We Have Come for Your Parents, Amen’s aggression is both their greatest strength and tragic flaw.

Maybe the reason I’ve never taken to this kind of madcap music is because I’ve never felt as angry as its instrumentation and lyrics. Amen never ventures into the blackout noise and chaos which can be the genre’s ultimate downfall. There’s still a sense of melody behind all the vitriol which kept me from writing it off as just another set of angry guys who know how to distort their voices and Fenders to say “fuck you” in a million different ways. But they still don’t seem to have very much intelligence beyond their fury. If there is some cleverness here, it’s of the sociopathic variety. Punk, at its best, is a release, alternately fun, political and clarifying. But their advice to burn churches and “kill with good intentions” betrays they haven’t really been seeking solutions so much as adding to the problems which plague this planet.

Amen is talented, in their own way. There are some engaging and murderous hooks here. “The Waiting 18,” in particular, is a track to be respected. But their frontman is named Casey Chaos and their record is called We Have Come for Your Parents, for God’s sake. So the thought of sitting across from any of these guys at a bar would terrify and frustrate me more than anything else. The same goes for listening to their record.

Album: HeartbreakerArtist: Ryan AdamsYear: 2000Reason Featured: #26 on The Village Voice’s Pazz & Jop Poll for 1999, #45 Album for NME’s Top Fifty Albums of 2000My Favorite Songs: To Be Young (Is To Be Sad Is To Be High), Come Pick Me UpTheir Grades:Rolling Stone (3/5), NME (8/10), Pitchfork (9.0/10), Robert Christgau ()My Grade: 75%

I’ve never really had a beef with Ryan Adams beyond thinking he’s overrated. Other people seem to have more decisive opinions. Some think he’s one of our greatest songwriters while others can’t get past how much an asshole he is in interviews. I remember listening to Gold years ago after seeing one rave review after another and just wishing I was listening to Yankee Hotel Foxtrot instead. When it comes to Heartbreaker, the same desire to switch over to Jeff Tweedy surfaced.

After the opening, unnecessary argument about Morrissey, I was happy to hear a song as catchy as “To Be Young (Is To Be Sad Is To Be High).” The only other song of his which I took to as fast was “Let It Ride” so I was hoping for some more of the same as the record progressed. But the ramshackle bounce of the second track gives way to one song after another of acoustic tearjerkers. Plenty of my favorite songs fall into that category but it’s far easier to digress into cliche when you take the way paved by Bob Dylan on Blood on the Tracks. Adams’ attempts at originality come through too bland and offhand.

If I saw a local singer-songwriter performing Heartbreaker tracks at a local coffee shop, I’d likely be impressed. But that’s just the thing. These songs are impressive if they’re performed by “some guy” but not by someone who fronted a prominent band like Whiskeytown. The fact NME ranked this a better album of the year and, thus, as a better album about heartbreak than 69 Love Songs just seems a little off to me. Robert Christgau’s assessment is the best. This is a record with one really good cut and a bunch of other songs which could’ve been cut without much complaint.

Album: 69 Love SongsArtist: The Magnetic FieldsYear: 1999/2000Reason Featured: #2 on The Village Voice’s Pazz & Jop Poll for 1999, #46 Album for NME’s Top Fifty Albums of 2000, #8 Album for Pitchfork’s Top Ten Albums of 1999, #9 Album for Rolling Stone’s Top Ten Albums of 1999My Favorite Songs: Disc One: I Don’t Want to Get Over You,I Think I Need A New Heart, The Book of Love, Sweet-Lovin’ Man, The Things We Did and Didn’t Do; Disc Two: When My Boy Walks Down the Street, Grand Canyon, No One Will Ever Love You, Papa Was A Rodeo, Abigail, Belle of Kilronan; Disc Three: The Death of Ferdinand de Saussure, Wi’ Nae Wee Bairn Ye’ll Me Beget, Yeah! Oh Yeah!, How to Say Goodbye, The Night You Can’t RememberTheir Grades:Rolling Stone (3/5), NME (8/10), Pitchfork (9.0/10), Robert Christgau (A+)My Grade: 96%

Brief Disclaimer: I’m going through these Best of Lists one by one. Now that I’m on NME’s Best of 2000 list, this showed up since, presumably, it wasn’t released in the UK until 2000. Stateside, this was a big hit on critics’ lists in 1999. Hence the two different years mentioned above. Carrying on!

Yes, there is filler on 69 Love Songs. There’s obvious, even-Stephin-Merritt-knows-this-is-filler tracks (“How Fucking Romantic,” “Punk Love, “Love Is Like Jazz”) and other less obvious musical mehs (“The One You Really Love,” “A Pretty Girl is Like…,” “Underwear”). This is a three hour and three disc long exploration of what a love song can be. If you stare at anything gargantuan long enough, you’ll find plenty to criticize. But the fact Stephin Merritt hits so much more often than he misses here is enough to erect an edifice in his honor. For this opus in particular, he cemented himself as one of the greatest and most distinctive songwriters of all time.

The thing that’s always impressed me about The Magnetic Fields / Stephin Merritt / 69 Love Songs is their / his / its ability to twist musical genres or the very idea of melody and love itself so as to make it appear their / his / its idea in the first place. There are plenty of typical Magnetic Fields songs on here: instant classics packed with shiny synthesizers hopping along in optimistic bliss as their lyrics drag their feet in depression (“The Luckiest Guy on the Lower East Side,” “Sweet-Lovin’ Man,” etc). But 69 Love Songs is significant for showing Stephin Merritt had a musical vocabulary to match his way with words.

This was the first Magnetic Fields record to dabble in instrumentation beyond intricate and twinkly synthesizers and guitars. There are accordion led waltzes (“My Sentimental Melody,” “The Night You Can’t Remember,” “Zebra”), folksy strummers and piano ballads to jerk out tears with tales of love won and lost (“The Book of Love,” “The Things We Did and Didn’t Do,” “Papa Was A Rodeo”) and alternately bleak and rejoicing nineties, Lou-Reed-lethargic guitar rock songs (“I Don’t Want to Get Over You,” “When My Boy Walks Down the Street,” “Yeah! Oh Yeah!”). The vastness of styles is all tied together by Merritt’s consistence as a clever and moving wordsmith. He can make you laugh and cry on command.

The idea of fate is somewhat cheap and unprovable but if Stephin Merritt was born to do anything, it was to write love songs.

I’ll put it to you this way: if you’re hankering for a record featuring a shirtless black man on the cover from 2000, you’d be better off with D’Angelo’s Voodoo than Q-Tip’s Amplified. This is about the best means of comparison I can come up with considering I’m woefully behind on checking out A Tribe Called Quest’s discography. Ergo, it’s hard to see how Q-Tip’s solo debut stacks up next to earlier collaborative work with that group.

You can take this whole shirtless analogy even further. Q-Tip stands arms-outstretched on his record’s cover, adorned in a grandiose coat and flanked by his postmodern posse. D’Angelo may be chiseled and impressive but its just him staring at the camera. Both poses typify what’s found therein. Amplified is a social record, one to put on when you and your friends want to bop your head while Voodoo is much more subtle, confident and demanding pensive listening.

Enough with this shirtless thing though before anyone thinks I’ve developed some bizarre fixation. Amplified is a hell of a good time even if there isn’t much here that’ll knock you backward in the kind of reverence Q-Tip seems to have for himself on the cover. The keyboard work on here is the real star, followed closely by the fluid but still edged-out raps themselves. (How can you resist the rapper role call on “Let’s Ride” in particular?) Contained here are glitchy beats shift to keep you partying; the songs on here have names like “All In,” “Go Hard,” and “Do It” so what would you expect? And as far as parties go, this is a pretty fun one to attend even if the host’s a bit more cocksure than he should be. Korn may be there (“End of Time”) but so’s J Dilla (co-produced every track with Q-Tip besides “Do It” and “N.T.,” which were handled by DJ Scratch). Everything evens out.

For an album called True Love and High Adventure, there’s very little to love here and even less that could be considered adventurous. To be fair, I only got a chance to listen to some of what’s on here as Spotify and YouTube could only attest to about two-thirds of the record. I scoured the Internet for the rest but came up dry. Maybe the ones I didn’t get a chance to hear make up for the mediocrity of most of the ones I did.

I can turn to late-‘80s to mid-‘90s Van Morrison for the lilting horn and soft-jazzy inflections brought out by “Sleepy.” The acoustic scutting/jinglebell combination which the title track opens with sent my eyes straight to the back of my head and nothing brought them back through the rest of the song. Even album opener “Wheels” doesn’t get me anywhere, despite its pleasant harmonies. In the interest of positivity, “Ladders to the Stars” is catchy and occasionally moving.

But the only real standout here is “A Little Numb,” the only track which appropriately hints at the grandness of the themes brought up in the album’s title. The fullness of the piano rolls, coupled with Hammond organs and harmonies by way of The Band, may not be the most original combination but it’s at least the most classic-sounding. I’m a sucker for old-school, late-‘60s/early-‘70s rock and roll hymns and this is definitely an admirable homage to that style of songcraft.

True Love and High Adventure is likable enough, even if its far from the musical questing its title suggests. At least one of the songs on here left me feeling more than “A Little Numb” and that’s more than I can say about plenty of records running around these days.

Included below is a compilation record by Grand Drive as it’s the only record of theirs available on Spotify